“Cucumbers and melons, as I have before said, are prone to be preys of the cutworms, squash bugs, striped beetles, and lice or aphis.  You know treatment for cutworms and lice.  The squash bug may be destroyed by hand.  Sometimes when bits of sticks are placed on the ground the bugs will crawl under them.  Next morning a small harvest of bugs can be killed.  The squash bug lays its eggs on the under surface of the plant’s leaves.  These leaves should be removed and burned.  The striped beetle is kept off by the Bordeaux mixture spray.  This beetle appears in June.  A spraying during this month often prevents a blight of the leaves in July.  This blight appears first as a spotting on the leaves, after which the leaves soon wither up.

“Onions, as well as radishes, are affected by maggots which will mine through the onion bulb as well as the stems of the young, tender plants.  A solution made from carbolic soap and water is excellent with which to water the soil about the plants.

“Peas have green lice as melons and cucumbers do.  The lice appear early in May and June, and are killed and kept down by the regulation treatment.  Many times during the latter part of summer peas may become mildewed.  You can tell this by a growth of white down on stem and leaves.  Put some soap in the Bordeaux mixture and spray.

“From May to October potato bugs flourish.  Paris green is the spray to use.  In the start they may be hand picked.  But do not let them get ahead of your hand.  A very serious potato disease is that of scab.  Scales appear on the potatoes themselves.  To prevent this, uncut seed potatoes are soaked in poison.  But this is not a work for you to do alone by any means.

“The squash bug naturally seeks out the squash vine.  He should be treated as we said when we talked of the same bug and melons.

“Tomatoes have numerous troubles.  The cutworm, the tomato worm, the horn worm, potato beetle and various blights may come to tomatoes.  The horn worm is a large green worm named from the horn at one end of its body.  It appears in midsummer.  Such large worms usually may be hand picked.  If you should see a tomato plant wilting for no reason at all, pull it up and burn it; it probably has an infectious trouble which is carried from one plant to another by insects.  It is really an infectious disease.

“These are the most common vegetable garden pests and their remedies.

“As the girls know, the flower garden is not without pests, too.  Plant lice are plenty enough.  These may appear at one time or another during the entire year.

“Some plants become covered with a little red spider.  It attacks the foliage and does great damage.  This may be due to lack of moisture with house plants.  I do not mean lack of watering, but a dry condition of the air of the room.  Often just a spray of clear water is sufficient to rid the plant of the mites.